Aviation

FAST, CHEAP, AND COMFORTABLE?

In commercial air transportation it is more difficult to improve customer comfort in order to attract and retain customers than in any other B2C industry. Comfort aboard the aircraft is financially limited – it would hypothetically be possible to arrange for roomier chair placement in economy class, but this is would be highly unprofitable in financial terms. The second component of passenger comfort is the ability to fly to one's destination directly without layovers. It's here where the economics of passenger transportation as a whole present an obstacle: although modern planes can technically fly from any airport to another without connections, in reality airlines still strive to have their flights to make stops at 'their own' airline hubs in lieu of direct flights.

Given these circumstances, airports, and especially large airline hubs, are becoming major venues where passengers can be sold additional services, entertainment, and advertisement content. Tens of millions of passengers who communicate in many languages pass through these transportation hubs. Airport passenger information services are becoming more personalized with the introduction of various applications for mobile devices, which require content translation across many languages.

AVIATION - THE FOREFRONT INDUSTRY IN DEVELOPMENT

Aviation production is on the cutting edge of science and technology, a field dealing with the application of complex and specialized knowledge. Therefore, document translation for aircraft construction requires translators who specialize in the subject area as well as good terminologists who can themselves offer insight and understanding of the matter at hand. It is translation companies that seek out and thoroughly test such specialized translators throughout the duration of their cooperation while constantly ensuring their level of qualification.

GLOBALIZATION

In the aircraft industry, the movement of commodity producers from their domestic market to the world market not only presents an opportunity to quickly and significantly increase sales volumes. Rather, it must be done, or these companies will find it impossible to recoup the costs of designing and manufacturing any aircraft. The complexity and length of the procedures for the international certification of aircraft components and systems stimulate broad international cooperation in the manufacturing of civil aircraft. The same situation exists in air transport: the global market is tens if not hundreds of times larger than any domestic one, and there's not much money to be earned on regional transport.

Aircraft construction and air transportation are industries that are on the one hand strictly regulated by state and international bodies, and on the other function with a high degree of international cooperation. To operate successfully and efficiently across foreign markets within these industries, it's necessary to constantly translate not only marketing, but also technical and legal documents that require knowledge of the subject matter and knowledge of industry terminology across different languages.

ON BOARD SERVICE, AIRPORT SERVICE, AND ONLINE SERVICE

For the entertainment of passengers on board, integrated in-flight equipment is used, whether it's seat-side In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) or more general on-board entertainment systems. An emerging trend is the marginalization of such equipment due to the use of mobile devices (smartphones) by the passengers themselves, which can easily be used to broadcast any content over Wi-Fi (which, as it has turned out, does not interfere with aircraft avionics after all).

Those at the airport that wait for the arrival of passengers also need to be entertained. At the same time, it must be ensured that they receive important information about changes of schedule, changes of terminal, the start of landing procedures, etc. In major airports, loud speakers have become a serious source of noise and related problems not just for passengers, but also for maintenance personnel. That being said, solutions are already being developed to switch to transmitting the most common announcements on the mobile devices of individual passengers. And, at the same time, this delivery method also opens up opportunities for entertainment and advertising content. Here, it is necessary (and, unlike what is possible using a loudspeaker, technically possible) to translate announcements and other content in accordance with each customer's needs. At the same time, new opportunities are opening for developers of specialized mobile applications and machine translation systems of both text and standard phrases of oral speech.

MULTILINGUAL TRANSLATION

When selling aircraft and helicopters on the foreign market, the manufacturer has to immediately translate complex documentation about the repair and maintenance of its products as well as marketing materials for international and company website exhibitions into many languages. This kind of translation requires special preparation, translation tools, and, most importantly, a wide range of experience in; writing texts, translating, proofreading, editing, developing corporate terminology and styles, developing corporate design, checking industry and company terminology, checking compliance with style, linguistic text quality verification, file formatting integrity verification, digital typesetting and printing ... For airlines operating in the face of fierce competition, the translation quality of marketing materials is especially important.

TRANSLATION CHALLENGES

When there are not one or even two translation languages, but several, internal translation departments find themselves struggling to cope without external suppliers. The solution: the ability to scale instantaneously by outsourcing the full complement of translation and content integration work to a translation service provider capable of performing all of the necessary tasks at a high level of quality for many languages. Experience has shown that it is better to choose a medium-sized translation company that retains the necessary specialists and has a good deal of accumulated experience but that has not yet turned into a huge corporation, which often entails inevitable problems. A multidisciplinary translation company is able to perform not only the highly specialized translation work, but also related jobs, such as creating the corresponding texts and graphics. The best translation company is one that turns the translation of marketing materials into a true art of the kind that only a select few professionals are masters of.

MULTILINGUAL SITES

For multinational enterprises in the aviation industry, and especially for airlines, a multilingual corporate website is a must. The translation of websites and the integration of translation tools with corporate content management systems is one of the many specialties of Logrus Global, which retains its own strong team of web developers.

INTRA-CORPORATE CORRESPONDENCE

When representative offices, production and service centers, and their associated supporting legal frameworks are located in different countries, it increases the volume of both internal and external correspondence in multiple different languages. Even if some one language is used for correspondence, there is still the need to translate information into the language spoken by the employees of the particular national office, and vice versa.

For the translation of internal correspondence, machine translation (MT) is the most widely used tool. However, from this arises the challenge of setting up the MT to respect corporate terminology and the issue of confidential information, which can not be 'released' to publicly used MT servers. Logrus Global and its technological partners offer a comprehensive solution for hosting IP servers based upon neural networks that function within the wider enterprise network. Logrus also integrates MT with communication channels as well as extracts and streamlines corporate terminology in addition to conducting on-site MT training.

BIG DATA ANALYTICS

Content is now generated in huge volumes by the Internet of Things and the various systems that collect statistical information about consumer behavior. Aircraft are now equipped with numerous sensors that transmit technical information in real time. The marketing strategies for selling airline tickets are based on the statistical analysis of the behavior of millions of ticket buyers and passenger flight boarding statistics. Such data comes from internal airline information systems and associated social networks. This information accumulates in various databases and is the subject of a large amount data analysis. Due to the fact that this information is transmitted across different languages, it needs to be able to be filtered and translated quickly, and this is only feasible by ensuring automated access to information at the API interface level. The talented programmers at Logrus Global have extensive experience developing tools for analyzing structured content and integrating translation systems (such as machine learning systems) with customer information systems through various APIs.

STAFF TRAINING

To promote products in another country, it is necessary to not only simply provide a product description to sellers or marketing specialists. It is imperative to teach them specific methods of promoting a particular product. Local service centers need to be provided with repair and diagnostic equipment as well as the translated instructions to go with them. The airline ticket dealer must be able to convince the customer that the flight provided by their airline will suit the customer better than the flights offered by other airlines. There arises the need to train personnel that repair equipment, cater passengers, and sell services. Nowadays, such training is mostly conducted electronically, and Logrus Global offers a full range of such services: from the selection of an e-Learning platform to the development of customized training courses.